


Link and the Lithuanians

by wneleh



Category: Rhett & Link
Genre: Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Gen, Teenagers
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-08-10
Updated: 2015-08-10
Packaged: 2018-04-13 23:35:43
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,908
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4541796
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/wneleh/pseuds/wneleh
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>It had seemed like a great idea – a summer on a boardwalk in California, working for a “Christ-centered family’s amusement park.”  Link would get to live and work with “young people from all over the world” for whom he could be a “witness of God’s redeeming love.”  </p><p>Well, if “witness” was a synonym for “narc,” maybe.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Link and the Lithuanians

**Author's Note:**

> This was inspired by Link's story about working at an amusement park in California one summer during college, shared during Ear Biscuit #35 "Summer Jobs." Nothing here, however, is based on specific details, people, or events.

“Charlie? Or do you prefer Charles?” Link’s boss, Mrs. D, asked from across her desk. “You seem more like a Charles to me.”

“Doesn’t matter,” said Link. 

“Charles, do you know why we recruited you? Paid for your ticket from North Carolina, are providing you housing, are paying you five times minimum wage?”

“Yes, ma’am.” She and Mr. D, the other owner of Double-D Boardwalk Amusements, had spelled it out the day he’d arrived.

“You don’t seem like you do. We hired you because, though we prefer the Eastern European work ethic, we like to have a southern good ol’ boy or two here every summer to keep an eye on things for us. To be our eyes and our ears. And I don’t think you’re doing your job very well. I never see you talking to any of the other kids.”

“Sorry, ma’am. I’ll make an effort to be friendlier.”

Mrs. D. pursed her face like she’d been gearing up for a fight that Link wasn’t giving her. 

“Can I go now, ma’am?” The cluttered office was intolerable. The entire cluttered mess of an amusement park was intolerable, but at least it was outside, at least he could see a bit of the sky, could feel a breeze, could breathe.

“Not yet.” Mrs. D slid a passport across the desk toward him. “Do you know this girl? I understand she goes by Tatyana.”

It was a Russian passport, belonging to a girl about his age. Light skin, dark blond hair. She wasn’t smiling. She looked like half the girls working at the park. 

“No, ma’am.”

“Really? She’s staying right next door to you.”

Link shrugged. “I don’t know her.”

“She disappeared two nights ago. You know nothing about this?”

Something had had his housemaets talking late into the previous night instead of going out, but it had been in Lithuanian and Link had understood none of it.

“No ma’am, sorry,” he said. “What do the police say?”

“We’re not bringing the police into this,” said Mrs. D. “She’s a twenty-year-old woman. They aren’t interested.”

“Well, her visa will expire at the end of the summer, right?” said Link. “She’ll have to go home then.”

Mrs. D barked a laugh, then looked at him closely. “You’re serious, aren’t you, Charles. Oh my God, how old are you?”

“Just turned nineteen, ma’am.”

“Lordy,” she said. “Get out of here, be back for your shift.”

“Okay,” he said, standing.

“Oh, one more thing, Charles,” she said, as if it was an afterthought, “Any more of your colleagues disappear, and I’m putting you on a plane back to North Carolina, and subtracting the cost from your pay. And a thousand for housing. And you may have a problem with your last paycheck. Do you understand?”

“Yes, ma’am,” he said, and fled.

It had seemed like such a great idea – a summer on the boardwalk in southern California, working for a “Christ-centered family’s amusement park.” He’d get to live and work with “young people from all over the world” for whom he could be a “witness of God’s redeeming love.” 

Well, if “witness” was a synonym for “narc,” maybe. 

And now he had two hours to fill. Walking to and from his place – a rundown bungalow a mile inland - would take most of an hour, so instead he headed two blocks up the boardwalk, to the internet café he’d been meaning to use to check his NC State email. Among the spam were several emails from his mother, a notice of an overdue library book he was sure he’d returned, and a half-dozen emails from Rhett, full of gossip about friends, complaints about work, and tales of after-work and weekend adventures. 

The most recent detailed waterskiing on Jordan Lake with the guys they’d be living with off-campus this coming year, Gregg and Tim. “Glad you didn’t kill yourself,” Link replied, then logged out.

\- - - - -

Over the next few days, Link tried to talk to his housemates more, he really did, but if anything it was harder. It wasn’t that they were bad guys – early on, when they’d realized he hated cigarette smoke, they’d ceded him a decently-well-ventilated front alcove as his sleeping space, and one of them in particular, Jonas, was always shoving food his way. The best thing about Jonas was that he didn’t seem too upset when, four times out of five, Link wasn’t be able to eat more than a bite. 

Saturday morning, Link’s housemates were up by seven, cooking together in the kitchen and creating way too much of a racket to sleep through. Making pancakes! Link eagerly tried a bite, thinking there was nothing that could be done to make a pancake inedible. He was wrong… Then he saw the sour cream container. Yuck.

“So you live this summer just on corn dogs?” Jonas asked, finishing Link’s serving. “How is it that you are not dead?”

“There’s lots of food groups in a corn dog,” said Link. “I eat salads at home.”

“Maybe find a salad here then?” 

“Too much work.”

“Then buy a salad? I know you are paid well.”

All five of his housemates were looking at him now.

“Yeah, they pay me to spy on you,” he blurted. “I suck at it.”

Link wasn’t sure whether he should be happy or insulted that everyone laughed.

\- - - - -

Link’s assignment that day was a moderately calm ride that you could steer as it flew*, so it attracted a pretty mixed crowd, prone to neither peeing nor vomiting – the best ride in the park from his point of view, really.

Link felt kind of bad for hating it.

His main responsibility was to count groups and collect tickets – eight groups max, no more than three to a seat, don’t worry too much about load balancing.

So that’s what he did all day. One. Two. Split group three in half, so that made four. Five…

Number five was a single, a guy as tall as Rhett. “Heyyo, soccer player,” he said, in a voice more outrageously drawn out than Link’s granddaddy Pop-pop’s. “I’m out of them lil tickets. You take a pack of gum instead?”

For a moment, Link could only stare at him. Did Rhett have a doppelgänger? Had Link forgotten to go to California? 

No, this was Rhett McLaughlin in front of him, laughing in his face, then turning and swinging over the rail like it was nothing. Link gaped after him.

“Can we get on, mister?”

A trio of little girls was next in line. Link ignored them, scanning the crowd. Rhett was already twenty yards away, buying a corn dog.

“Mister!!!!”

Rhett turned and saluted.

Did Rhett expect Link to take the evening off and show him around? He was working! Would Rhett get bored and simply disappear? No, there was no way he’d have come out to California NOT to see Link…

It just made no sense. Why had he come? Why hadn’t he emailed? Maybe he HAD emailed and Link had missed it, he hadn’t checked his college account since right after talking with Mrs. D on Wednesday…

\- - - - -

Somehow, Rhett had found Jonas. The two appeared together shortly before Link’s scheduled break. “I will take your evening assignment,” said Jonas. “Elias is covering my ice cream cart, and Sashetti is covering Elias’s job in the gift shop because she is not yet ice-cream trained. Sashetti was supposed to be off tonight, so it all works out.”

“You work with great people,” said Rhett. “I was going to buy you a corn dog but Jonas suggested I pick up something vaguely healthy instead.” He shook his knapsack. “Trail mix and apple juice, plus some water. Let’s roll. Got a favorite spot?”

“Huh?”

“Of course you don’t. Follow me.”

Instead of heading north towards the boardwalk and Link’s bungalow, Rhett took out a mini Maglite and led them down to the beach to the south. Above them, Link knew expensive homes sat on a bluff protected by a rocky seawall, but the angle of the slope, or maybe the brightness of the Maglite, rendered them invisible. The world had contracted to him, Rhett, the narrow oval of light in front of them, and the sound of waves lapping dozens of yards to their right.

After a few minutes, Rhett led them up to the sea wall, to a sandy opening between low boulders. They both sank to the ground, and Rhett handed him a bottle of water. “Talk,” he said. “What the hell is wrong with you?”

“What? You’re the one who just appeared out of nowhere. Did I invite you? No.”

“’Glad you didn’t kill yourself,’” Rhett said, and Link realized he was quoting Link’s email. “’Glad you didn’t kill yourself.’ What the hell were we supposed to do with that?”

“’We’? Who’s ‘we’?”

“Myself, Gregg, Tim… Decided I’d better not contact your mom, or she’d have been on the next flight herself. Or my mom. Nothing for four weeks, then ‘Glad you didn’t kill yourself.’”

“Well, at the time, I WAS glad,” said Link, trying to hold onto - something. “You didn’t have to show the world.”

“Gregg pitched in $50 and found me a cheap round trip out of Charlotte, out this morning, back in time for work Monday. Tim drove me to the airport.”

“Great,” Link snapped, looking way, “now I owe Gregg $50.”

“Talk to me, brother.”

“I…” Link wanted to tell him – everything. How lonely he was. How he couldn’t BREATHE where he was living. About Tatyana, vanished and nobody really caring, maybe heading home, maybe taking a stab at life in America, maybe dead. About law and order and…

“Okay, twenty questions. Are you sick?”

“No.” If you didn’t count the persistent pain in his stomach.

“Do you feel okay?”

Link shrugged.

“Do you want to come home?”

This, he could answer. “If I leave now, I forfeit thousands of dollars, when you factor everything in.”

Rhett whistled. “Gotcha,” he said. “Is someone picking on you?”

“I’m not eleven.”

“Is it a girl?”

It was, kind of, but… “Not like that.” He sighed. “One of the girls I work with disappeared. Nobody knows what happened to her.”

“Well, eventually her visa will expire.”

“I don’t think she ever had a visa.” 

“Really?”

“Really,” said Link.

“That’s it?” Rhett asked. “Someone else’s visa problems got you down?”

“Damn it, Rhett, I wouldn’t expect you to understand!” Link jumped up to get – anywhere but where he was – but tripped and caught a hip on a boulder and landed almost on top of Rhett. 

“Hold on, sorry, hold on,” Rhett said as he pulled back. “Talk to me.”

“They’re working here illegally I think. Maybe all of them. If they get caught, am I in trouble?”

“Did you hire them? Did you fake any documents? Then it’s not your problem.”

“Can we ask your dad?”

“Do you WANT to get them deported?”

“I don’t know. I don’t know what the right thing to do is. I mean, the park is holding their passports. Does that mean they’re prisoners, essentially?”

“I know it’s a lousy thing to be in the middle of, but, seriously, I’d let it be.”

“Of course you would.” Link thought maybe he was getting sick, his throat hurt, breathing hurt, his breath felt so hot…

“Come here, brother…”

When they’d been kids, Rhett would occasionally win – or at least stop - arguments by simply sitting on him. This, Link thought, was similar – Rhett leaning and grabbing and pulling and now Link was completely enfolded in his arms, in the dark, in a hole in a sea wall in Southern California.

“It’s okay, I’m all right,” he protested, but didn’t pull away.

“Come home,” Rhett murmured into his hair.

“No, I can’t… It’s not just the money… I signed a contract, I gave my word.”

“I’m worried about you. You understand that, right? You’re hurting and I don’t know how to fix this.”

“I don’t either,” said Link.

\- - - - -

When Link woke, the waning moon was rising above the bluff behind them. “What time is it?” he asked, sensing Rhett was also awake.

Rhett flicked the Maglite on and checked his watch. “3 a.m.,” he said. “My body thinks it’s 6. Time for me to get up.”

“You’re leaving today, right?” asked Link. “You work tomorrow.”

“Yeah. There’s a bus to the airport that leaves at 2 that I need to be on. Unless you need me here.”

“Ever touched the Pacific?”

“Not since I was six. Didn’t get a chance yesterday,” said Rhett.

“Then let’s do it now.”

The moon cast more than enough light to let them play tag with the waves, dashing up and down, kicking up sand and bits of shell. After they’d tired themselves out a little they walked along the furthest reach of the waves, where the sand was relatively compact. Rhett talked about water skiing, about his mind-numbingly boring job with the North Carolina Department of Transportation, about a girl he had his eye on. About finding time to practice his guitar, about techniques he was trying to conquer. Link mostly listened, picking the peanuts and the M&M clones out of Rhett’s trail mix, leaving him the raisins and the sunflower seeds out of spite. 

It was nice. This is my life, he thought. This could be so much worse.

Eventually they returned to what Link now considered their personal rock nook; Link couldn’t keep his eyes open, so Rhett told him to nap, then settled beside him with a paperback. By the time Link awoke again, the sun was up and Rhett was trying to skip pebbles through the now-closer backwash.

“I don’t think that’s going to work,” said Link.

“Oh ye of little faith,” said Rhett. “Speaking of which – I’m betting you don’t have a church here?”

Link shook his head.

“Okay, well, in 30 minutes, there’s a service at the amphitheater right below your amusement park. Ecumenical. Let’s crash it.”

Since they looked like they’d spent the night on the beach, they decided to sit behind the bleachers. The whole affair was very church-lite, the sort of thing they’d always been taught to be wary of, but Link found the hymns comforting, and the reading was – well, transfixing. Hebrews 2, which Link had never really thought about before. ‘Both the one who makes people holy and those who are made holy are of the same family,’ and ‘For surely it is not angels he helps, but Abraham’s descendants.’

“I can’t turn them all in,” he whispered to Rhett. “Not even the owners.”

Rhett nodded. “Maybe you’re here for a purpose, not to verb-witness to anyone, but to BE a witness?” Rhett whispered back. “So that if anything does happen to those kids, if things turn truly abusive, they’ll have a voice?”

“I didn’t ask for this.”

“No one ever does,” said Rhett.

\- - - - 

As much as he didn’t want Rhett to see the chaos he was living in, he needed to shower and change into another work shirt, so after the service they grabbed a cup of coffee, then walked up to the cluster of bungalows Double-D rented to house their summer workforce. 

Of course Rhett loved the houses. “Arts & Crafts! This is wonderful! Sears Kit, I’m pretty sure,” he said. “Though maybe not. Check out this molding.” When Link ignored him he turned to Link’s housemates, who were slowly congregating, seemingly having had late nights themselves. “Look at this corner here…”

Link emerged from the shower to find Rhett telling tales of his high school soccer career. “The best defensive midfielder Harnett Central had had in half a decade,” he was saying. “He even scored – twice, in one game! Left-footed!”

The other guys nodded at him approvingly. “I did not know you played futbolas,” said Jonas. “Did you know we play most every night?”

“Where?”

“At a school not far from here. The town provides lights until 2 a.m., sometimes 2:30. Join us tonight?”

“I think I’ll need a bed, early,” said Link. “But tomorrow, I’ll think about it.” He paused. “My cleats and shin guards are back home.”

“I can mail them!” Rhett said, but Jonas interrupted him. 

“None of us have right shoes,” he said. “Is okay.”

\- - - - -

Much too soon, Link had to head to work, and Rhett to the bus depot. Rhett pulled him into another hug, less desperate than last night’s, maybe, but as sincere. 

“You’ll email me twice a week,” he said.

“Yeah,” said Link.

“You’ll call me, or Gregg, or my mother even, if you need someone to talk to. Collect.”

“Yeah.”

“Alrighty then.”

Link watched Rhett head down the street for a few minutes, then turned; Jonas was standing not five feet from him. “Your friend, he has asked me to ask you, what sort of shoes do spies wear?”

Link stared at him. 

“I repeat for you. What sort of shoes do spies wear?”

Link continued to stare.

“The sneakers!”

Link felt himself gaping, and snapped his mouth shut. 

“I am to tell you one from this every day,” said Jonas, waving a small notebook of the sort Rhett used for recording song ideas. When had Rhett had time to compile a list of bad jokes? Had he COME with them? Yes, that was the sort of thing Rhett might actually have preplanned. “And maybe you will explain them to me?”

Link’s smile actually hurt his face. “Yeah, okay,” he said.

**Author's Note:**

> This is completely irrelevant, but I was picturing the “Rowdy Roosters” ride at my favorite amusement park, Canobie Lake in southern New Hampshire. To get a sense of whether this ride exists other places I typed “flying roosters” into Google; the first returns were about “Link’s Awakening.” Yikes!!!! Even odder, I hadn’t realized Link was a Zelda character until this past week’s Ear Biscuit. 
> 
> Regarding religious content – seriously, giving real people sex lives feels like less of an intrusion. But, heck, at the age Rhett and Link were in this story, they were in it deep, and I couldn’t ignore that, having spent my late teens sampling from the Evangelical fountain myself occasionally. 
> 
> I’d figured that I’d have Rhett drag Link to a beachside ecumenical service, because I love beachside ecumenical services, but wasn’t going to have it be particularly meaningful to Link. Then, what was the reading yesterday at church? Hebrews Chapter 2, which was perfect for this story. Hebrews is a book I don’t think Link would know very well at 19, because most scholars agree that, though it’s attributed to Paul, it probably wasn’t really written by him, and once you start down that road… Anyway. The text used here is from the NIV, stolen from BibleGateway.


End file.
